Sunday, February 18, 2007

nascar...

0.02 seconds -

Thats the margin by which Kevin Harvick won against Mark Martyn. Kevin was remarkable at the finish in the last half lap !

Overall, the race was remarkable. Race was fairly smooth up until 168 laps. There were 6 cautions thereafter - infact, race ended in a caution ! Last lap, there were so many whamos ! There was one car on fire and on the roofs too - Bowyer's car ! It was a wild finish - something similar to 1976/1979 finals - something for the record books :)

skiing

Location: Seven Springs

Nightlife places I got to visit: Foggy Goggle

Woke up at 7.20 am - brushed my teeth and ran to the bus stop. Alas, there's a bus on Sat morning and I reached the departure venue at 7.28am. The buses had not yet departed (or I would've cursed the movie "The Departed" which I watched the previous night till 2.30 am and slept at 3.45 am).

The buses reached Seven Springs at 9 am. Getting ready for skiing took me an hour as I had to buy the shell pants to make sure I am water-proof from head to the toe. Those skiing shoes are soooooooo non-ergonomic w.r.t. walking for non-skiing purposes. Anyways, I get ready to take my lessons at the ski-school. The first lessons went on fine except for once when I fell down due to the lack of skills to slow down my speed. As the lesson progressed, I started getting better grip of my stance and skiied better. I kept on practicing in the magic carpet 1 area.

Around lunch time, Chris (friend from MISM) came on near me and it was a pleasant surprise to see him right there. We decided to head for lunch. He was trying to locate his girlfriend Michelle so that we could all have lunch together. However, post-lunch he could locate her and it was so nice having a small chat with them together.

I hit back to skiing - this time in the magic carpet 2 area. Thereafter, I tried several slopes once I mastered the skill of turning and controlling my speed. I took another break and changed my shoes to upgrade from 11.5 to 12 size - what a relief for my left foot !

Final round of skiing was disastrous as I lost my phone at that time. I took off the skis and returned in order to search for the same. I had heard from colleagues that the place is good and ppl return the cell phones. After visiting all the 3 information desks, I returned to the second one. Rob and Rich were there. Rob had assured me that I would get my phone back if someone returned my phone back. Rich was present at the counter the second time I returned and he asked me a few questions to confirm if the phone was mine. My stylus was lost and the screen more damaged - however, I was so relieved due to the return of the phone. Many thanks to Rich !

At 6pm, I tried to connect to few MISM colleagues from fall batch (man, except Chris noone from the summer batch was present - what's wrong with the summers?). However, as none of the connections were coming through, I decided to hit the bar - it was fairly populated and the DJ had started going on -alongwith the crowd being energetic. Somewhere Sera (a fall MISMer) saw me but never joined to dance with me citing the reason that I was surrounded by gorgeous chics and that she didn't want to disturb me - silly Sera! Rest of the MISMs were too tired to even visit the bar ! Foggy Goggle was a nice little place - I wouldn't say it was the best - but say 4 .5 on a scale of 10 (with 10 being the best). The crowd was 7 on 10 for their enthusiasm. Moreover, I was there only for 45 mins as I had to come back to get into the bus by 7.20pm.

All in all - a fun outing for the winter and perfect timing as the fresh snow had made skiing environment conducive on the slopes and the day was relatively less chiller!